Honest Chaos
an aphorism
That too is a thought, is it not? These various ideas that pop up into our perception without our awareness. From whence do they come, and why do we so often denigrate what it is we ourselves think? I have, for some time now, placed myself under constant pressure, with the hope that anxiety will not overtake me; and I feel I have been successful thus far, but for how long and to what purpose I actually do this, I know not. This stress is the result of my constant battles, my longest labors, my most harrowing inner conflicts, which I fear may one day consume me completely.
My ideas are under assault from my own person. I denigrate what it is I always have to think. The first thoughts are always the most challenging, for they represent for me a decision which I am forced to make and yet cannot make. The constant wanderings and delusions I call the first idea are just that—phantoms of truth. Has there ever been a man who wrote a masterpiece without giving it a second thought? Has extemporaneous prose ever received its magnum opus, its mot juste epitome?
Some say Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Proust, and the rest of the moderns. Some prefer those who only wrote in the 19th century: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dumas, Balzac, Eliot, Austen, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, Emerson, etc. Others return to the neoclassicists: Goethe, Condorcet, Voltaire, Jefferson, Burke, Johnson, Addison, etc. Some, like me, always have the Italian Renaissance in mind—that noble return to the classics—with men like Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Salutati, Alberti, Poliziano, and Mirandola. And then, ignoring the Dark Ages—while still admiring the chivalric romances, Beowulf, and Boethius—we turn to the foundations of prose, the true classics as we call them; an age that has too much adulation associated with it, merely on historical grounds alone.
Most couldn’t quote you the letters of Cicero, recite the escapades of Encolpius (from The Satyricon), or provide the details of Caesar’s adventures in Gaul; the prose of Plato, the poetry of Pindar, or the humor of Aristophanes. But still, by sheer virtue of its antiquity alone, everything written in this age is considered a relic by fools and scholars alike. I, for one, think most of it well written, melodic, poetic, natural, and immensely deep—such is what one should expect from a cultured language like Latin or Ancient Greek—but I still find it incomprehensible that some will say that only adherence to the very ancient, the most ancient in fact, is best. This I have no patience for and would willingly strike out all the grandeur in them if it meant subservience to their model.
The first thought, like all first thoughts, is difficult if you feel uninspired. I sometimes think it better to not write at all if the heart cannot be felt or touched during ruminations. What good is produced when mangling your language, when botching your phrases, when misplacing your periods? Who benefits from overused adjectives? Are the scribbles of a writer who is not master of himself worthy of being read at all? I say avoid all such nonsense. Anything nonessential must go, and quickly, I feel. Better it is to stumble your way through a paragraph that came to you in a fever dream, a moment of excitement and passion, than to force yourself into composing sentences that fail to speak to any potential souls.
What use is writing if it cannot guide a lost individual? Should we not all try to speak our truths to those who understand where we come from? There is a natural sympathy had between writer and reader—the writer writes what the reader feels but is too hesitant to say. Let the style be damned! What matters is where the author's heart was when wrestling with the diction. That’s all words are to me—strings of sentiment meant to awaken the reader, to give the reader the courage to speak their own truths, to forge their own paths, to empower them, to take the necessary actions for life, for the improvement of their soul and humanity.
I prefer to be unorganized but honest rather than organized and boring. The way writing, and essay writing in particular, is taught in school today is not much different from how it was taught in the days of Quintilian. We stick to models we were trained to admire, but never discover for ourselves what was admirable in them—assuming they are even worthy of admiration. I suspect, and this is a big hunch here, that the only reason writers look to the classical age as some paragon of expression is because the models they were trained on actively encouraged skepticism, thinking for oneself, finding your own voice. When the children of the Roman elite read Homer and Demosthenes, did they not encounter a vigorous spirit, a vivacious mind teeming with ideas and themes that they themselves were wont to reflect on?
It’s not enough to say they were exposed to better writing—it could be argued that the great novels and essays we read today will be considered classics 2,000 years from now. Are there no great writers today? Of course there are, so why not allow the present some leverage in the conversation of good literature?
Man becomes his own model the moment he ceases to become beholden to others—that is the best of writers.